H2O

I was shocked on getting around to starting - and finally finishing - H2O recently to discover that I actually added the book to my Goodreads back in April 2016, when I swapped for it at a book exchange. I've been moving it around from home to home for over seven years and, despite having attempted to read it a few times during that period, I had never got much past the first chapter before setting it aside. Now that we are actually living on water - in a narrowboat - though I felt that the time was right to really persevere with Philip Ball's aquatic epic. I'm glad to have done so because I learned a lot, even though a fair bit of this book stretched my scientific understanding.

Ball writes clearly and enthusiastically about a wide range of subjects in which water is an essential part. He begins by delving into its chemical composition before speeding right back to the moments immediately following the Big Bang when the very first water molecules were formed. I learned about water's role in the earliest life forms, how it has transformed the Earth and how its influence has shaped other planets and moons in our solar system and beyond. Ball also discusses our cultural connections to water, concepts of purity and waste, and how our taking this quirky yet essential substance for granted is causing increasing problems and scarcity across the globe.

H2O was first published over twenty years ago so some of the information relating to things like climate change and industrial farming is now quite out of date, though I still found it interesting in that warning bells were being sounded twenty years ago yet nowhere near enough action was taken leaving us in an ever greater predicament now. I imagine that some of the other science may also have been superseded so this might not be a great book to read now for keen scientists, but for a layperson such as myself it was absolutely fascinating to see just how much life on Earth is dependent upon the actions of water. From the biological processes in the tallest trees to the historic drying out of the Mediterranean basin, Ball agilely leaps from subject to subject - frequently leaving me quite exhausted in his wake! I now have a far greater respect for water and a new understanding of just how miraculous this seemingly simple substance is.